As of 2024, TikTok boasts over a billion active users globally, making it a key player in social media. Its unique algorithm promotes content discovery and engagement allowing even new creators to reach vast audiences quickly.
Influencer marketing on TikTok has become an essential strategy for brands looking to connect with younger, digitally-savvy audiences. Influencers on TikTok, ranging from nano and niche micro-influencers to mega influencers, have the power to shape trends, drive engagement, and build authentic connections with followers. This ability to generate genuine, relatable content makes influencer marketing on TikTok incredibly effective for brand promotion and customer engagement.
A Comprehensive Guide to TikTok Influencer Marketing
Understanding TikTok Influencer Marketing
As of 2023, TikTok boasts over 1 billion active users worldwide, making it a prime arena for brands looking to connect with diverse and vibrant audiences. Influencer marketing on TikTok leverages the popularity and creativity influencers to promote products or services in a way that feels authentic and engaging to their followers.
What is TikTok Influencer Marketing?
TikTok influencer marketing involves partnering with TikTok creators who have a significant following and influence on the platform. These influencers create content that showcases a brand's product or service, weaving it into their unique style and narrative. This approach not only amplifies brand visibility but also taps into the trust and rapport influencers have built with their audience.
Essential facts for marketers
Key Facts You Should Know as a Marketer
- Influencer marketing delivers 11 times the ROI compared to traditional banner ads.
- TikTok micro-influencers have an 18% engagement rate, compared to Instagram’s micro-influencer engagement rate of 3.86%.
- There are 78.7 million active TikTok users in the United States.
- 90% of TikTok users open the app daily.
Why TikTok Influencer Marketing is Effective
1. Authentic Engagement: TikTok influencers create content that feels genuine and relatable. Their ability to produce authentic content helps brands connect with audiences in a more personal and impactful way compared to traditional advertising.
2. Viral Potential: The platform’s algorithm promotes content that engages viewers, making it easier for influencer posts to go viral. This can significantly boost a brand's exposure and reach within a short period.
3. Targeted Reach: Influencers often have a well-defined follower base, which allows brands to target specific demographics effectively. Whether it's teenagers, young adults, or niche communities, brands can find influencers whose audience matches their target market.
The Mechanics of TikTok Influencer Marketing
The textbook definition of influencer marketing is when a brand receives promotional content from creators in exchange for products, services, or money. The benefit for brands is that they step foot into a new audience pool whereas the influencers benefit from the products or money they receive.
TikTok has multiple features to help brands navigate seamlessly and get the best results from their marketing efforts. Here’s a quick guide to get you started:
1. Business Account
Having a business account on TikTok allows you to receive information about your viewers and followers. TikTok analytics gives you data about social engagement, following, content performance, etc. that helps you better optimize your campaigns.
You can simply go to ‘manage account’ under ‘settings’ and select ‘switch to business account’ under ‘account control’.
2. Campaign Goals
Establishing clear and effective campaign goals is a crucial step in ensuring the success of your TikTok marketing efforts. Well-defined goals help guide your strategy, measure your progress, and ultimately determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. Here’s how to establish campaign goals on TikTok:
- Understand your business objectives: Start by aligning your TikTok campaign goals with your broader business objectives. Common objectives include brand awareness, driving website traffic, growing follower base, boosting sales, and improving customer engagement.
- Define Specific Goals: Specific goals are clear and detailed, leaving no room for ambiguity. Instead of setting a vague goal like "increase engagement," aim for a specific target such as "achieve a 10% increase in engagement over the next three months."
- Make your goals measurable: Ensure your goals are quantifiable so you can track your progress and measure success. Use metrics such as: Number of views, Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares), Follower growth, Click-through rate (CTR), Conversion rate
- Set achievable goals and time bound goals: Your goals should be realistic and attainable based on your resources, time, and current capabilities. Setting overly ambitious goals can lead to disappointment and may demotivate your team.
3. Campaign Type
TikTok marketing campaigns range from product reveal to unboxing to tutorials. Based on your objectives and goals, identify which campaign type best suits your marketing efforts.
4. Influencer Collaboration
Identify and select the influencers you want to collaborate with. Reach out to them with your campaign details and all the information they need to create content. Make sure to give them the freedom to be creative and avoid scripting every single detail.
Repurpose the content you receive from them and use it on multiple occasions and in various formats to maximize its value. This can include images, reviews, video ads, and even email marketing. Ensure you include the right to repurpose content in your contract with the influencer to avoid any misunderstandings.
Drive Sales with TikTok Video Shopping Ads
TikTok Video Shopping Ads maximize website sales by leveraging the purchasing power of the TikTok community. This e-commerce advertising tool works to increase your website's sales by offering tailored product recommendations on the ‘For You’ page and providing multiple ad placements. By integrating your products, TikTok Video Shopping Ads effectively boost product sales and enhance your brand's visibility on the platform.
Benefits of TikTok video shopping ads
How do you benefit from TikTok Video Shopping Ads?
-
Find new customers
Tap into a new customer base and re-engage with previous customers as they discover and rediscover your products.
-
Better Buying Experience
With exclusive features, reducing the number of clicks, and a seamless checkout, you can give your customers a better buying experience.
-
Continuous Influx of Sale
With innovative formats and placements, Video Shopping Ads help boost sales throughout the year, on special occasions, and during seasonal promotions.
Spark Ads
To further amplify the effectiveness of TikTok Video Shopping Ads, brands can utilize Spark Ads to boost their campaigns.
What are Spark Ads?
Spark Ads are a unique feature that allows advertisers to promote existing posts from their TikTok accounts, rather than creating new, separate advertisements. This approach ensures that all engagement metrics such as views, comments, shares, likes, and follows are directly attributed to your original post.
By leveraging Spark Ads, your promotional efforts enhance the organic reach of your content, thereby not only increasing visibility but also contributing to the authenticity and organic growth of your brand’s presence on the platform. This integration of native content into advertising efforts results in a more seamless user experience and can significantly increase the effectiveness of your campaigns, driving more sales and stronger customer engagement.
Campaign Types on TikTok
TikTok offers a range of creative formats to communicate with your audience. Brands can leverage this by linking their Business account to Shopify to create shoppable posts directly from their videos. Here some ad types that brands can create:
- In-feed ads: Videos that blend seamlessly into the user's feed.
- Pre-roll ads: Videos that play when the user opens the app.
- Promoted hashtag challenges: Videos that encourage users to create and share clips using a specific hashtag, ideal for increasing brand awareness.
Crafting a Winning TikTok Strategy
1. TikTok Trends
Identifying trends is an ongoing process. You need to keep your eyes and ears open to capture trends at the right time. It can be a trending song, a trending hashtag or a trending dance or sports challenge.
2. Creative Storytelling
Traditional advertisements often fail to give the desired results because audiences are quick to disregard content that is not authentic. By producing informative yet entertaining videos, you can engage viewers in a way that feels natural.
When partnering with a TikTok influencer for a campaign, the focus shouldn’t be merely on showcasing your brand. Instead, the content should illustrate the imperfections and the reality that the audience can relate to, provide essential information about your product, and highlight its benefits. The key is to ensure that the content feels authentic.
3. Choosing the Right Influencer
The success of your campaign largely depends on user engagement. You need to understand the target demographics of your campaign. What age group and type of followers are you aiming to reach with your brand campaign? Choose an influencer whose audience aligns with it to ensure a successful collaboration with positive results.
4. Giving Influencers Creative Freedom
Over-scripting campaigns for influencers can strip the content of their unique personality. It’s important to allow influencers the freedom to do what they do best while integrating your brand into their content. This approach ensures their audience can connect with the content they create and, ultimately, with your brand.
Key Insights about TikTok Influencers
Here are some important details that you should know about influencers before jumping into influencer marketing:
Types of Influencers
There are different types of influencers based on their number of followers, each offering unique advantages. Nano and micro influencers have smaller communities but tend to have the most engaged community. On the other hand, macro and mega influencers are like celebrities and typically charge higher rates for brand collaborations compared to nano and micro influencers.
Influencer hierarchy
Influencer Hierarchy
- Nano-influencers: 1K - 10k followers
- Micro-influencers: 10K - 50K followers
- Mid-tier influencers: 50K - 500K followers
- Macro-influencers: 500K - 1M followers
- Mega-influencers & celebrities: Over 1M followers
Nano and Micro Influencers have the Highest Engagement Rate
While influencers are valuable for social commerce, their effectiveness varies. A successful social commerce strategy depends on partnering with the appropriate tier of influencers.
The graph below shows that nano and micro influencers have the highest engagement rate on TikTok. It is also true that influencers on TikTok have the highest engagement rate compared to influencers on any other platform.
Average engagement rate for all tiers of TikTok influencers
Collaborating with nano-influencers is an affordable way for brands to engage a niche target audience. Mega- and macro-influencers, on the other hand, are ideal for brands ready to invest more to quickly reach a vast audience.
Popular TikTok Campaign Types
1. Hashtag campaign
Branded hashtags are often central to successful TikTok campaigns, encouraging users to produce their own videos by participating in a challenge. Influencers on TikTok initiate these campaigns by presenting challenges to their followers, which can take the form of dance routines, makeup tutorials, taste tests, or fashion showcases.
2. Unboxing, video reviews, product tutorials
In these videos, Influencers showcase the products, try them out, provide their opinions, and encourage their audience to comment or follow. For those interested in buying, affiliate links offering discounts are typically included in their bios.
3. Sponsored content
Making a sponsored TikTok video is much like creating your usual TikTok content. The primary distinction is that influencers need to add #ad or #sponsored in the captions whenever they post. This ensures transparency, letting their viewers know that they are being compensated for the post.
Conclusion
TikTok is growing exponentially, and this is the right time to jump into it with your brand. In 2023, TikTok hit 1.5 billion users, marking a 16% increase from the previous year. This extensive reach makes TikTok marketing incredibly valuable, and many brands have already recognized its potential. As the fastest-growing platform, TikTok excels in promoting authentic, organic content, allowing brands to connect with younger audiences.
If you're ready to dive into TikTok marketing, book a demo with Skeepers to discover how influencer marketing can drive your business growth.
Asmita Gaikwad
Asmita Gaikwad is a content strategist with a focus on User-Generated Content, Influencer Marketing, and Social Commerce. Currently based in Paris, Asmita can be found exploring local cafés in her free time, soaking up inspiration from books, and enjoying the vibrant energy of city life.
